Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain Guest Editors’ Editorial: the Next Step
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain Guest Editors’ Editorial: The Next Step Pompeu Casanovasa,b, Monica Palmiranic, Silvio Peronid,*, Tom van Engerse, Fabio Vitalif a [email protected] Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Campus de la UAB, 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain b [email protected] Law and Policy Program: Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre, Law School, Deakin University 1 Gheringhap Street, Geelong VIC 3220, Australia c [email protected] CIRSFID, University of Bologna, via Galliera, 3, 40121 Bologna (BO), Italy d [email protected] Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40126 Bologna (BO), Italy e [email protected] Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Vendelstraat 8, 1012 XX Amsterdam, The Netherlands f [email protected] Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40126 Bologna (BO), Italy Abstract. Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks—grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence—are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders —front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art. Keywords: Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, Ontologies, Linked Data, Semantic Web and its applications, Regulations, Rights 1. Introduction currently constitutes one of the most interesting topics in the scientific publishing domain. The Semantic Web has been devoted to addressing social Probably due to the success the Semantic Publishing issues from the outset. For instance, in the field’s best-known movement is having in academia, several publishing 4 5 seminal article [1], Tim Berners-Lee, Handler, and Lassila companies (e.g., the Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier ) 6 describe intelligent agents dialoguing and interacting between and journals (e.g., the Semantic Web Journal [65] and 7 each other in order to solve a particular medical scenario. Journal of Universal Computer Science ) are approaching However, in the early years of the Semantic Web, the main Semantic Publishing by releasing concrete datasets and effort went into background studies, where Artificial applications. These initiatives represent the first formal Intelligence (AI) and Knowledge Engineering (KE) were the endorsement of publishing-related industries in moving main actors on the scene. Activities mostly involved the towards Semantic Web technologies in real-case industrial development of new formal languages (e.g., RDF [33], RDFS scenarios. [19] and OWL [75]1), APIs (e.g., Jena [20] and OWLAPI On the other hand, the work carried out by Legal [61]), reasoners (e.g., Pellet [114] and Hermit [76]), ontology Information Institutes (LII)8 and the Free Access to Law development editors (e.g., Protégé [70] and the NeOn Toolkit Movement (FALM)9 deserves a mention. Based on the right [116]), and visualization tools (e.g., VOWL2 [72] and LODE of republication, they have devoted themselves, over the last [91][92]). twenty years, to providing free online access to case law, Only later, and standing on the shoulders of the legislation, treaties, law reforms, and legal scholarship.10 This aforementioned works, did people start to approach the is a significant contribution to the development of the rule of Semantic Web from different perspectives, such as law from a global point of view. engineering (i.e., Linked Data [12]), the social sciences (i.e., Their success is incontrovertible, because of its global Social Semantic Web [57]), and the hard sciences (i.e., Web scope. For example, the Cornell LII was visited last year by Science [60]). The Semantic Web then started to broaden its about 30 million different individuals from 246 countries and reach, moving from academia to other (more “applicative”) territories.11 AustLII12 shows similar results.13 Total hits for domains, such as industry, administration, and, last but not 2014 exceeded 223 million and averaged 611,545 hits per least, law—the very topic of this special issue. day. By the end of 2015 AustLII had 708 databases; 712 in In the following sections we want to spend a few words on February 2016.14 On average, it has been adding more than examples of applications of Semantic Web technologies to one new database every two weeks since it was started in these domains before presenting, in Section 7, five high- 1995.15 quality articles that have been selected for this special issue LII and FALM have been paying a close attention to of the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain. Semantic Web developments [93] to enable easier access to legal texts and improve their readability [32]. Let Thomas R. 2. Semantic Web, Industry, and Free Access to Bruce, director of the Cornell LII, freely provide some Law: Publishers Meet Semantics specific examples:16 “On the technical side, we employ Semantic Web According to the vision provided in foundational works technologies in a number of our features and collections. For [109][111][95][34], Semantic Publishing is the use of example, search of some portions of the US Code is enhanced Semantic Web technologies to enhance published documents with Linked Data from the DrugBank database, which directs (e.g., journal articles) in order to enable the definition of users who search for a brand-name drug to the regulations formal representations of their meaning, facilitate their that deal with the components of that drug (so, for example, a automatic discovery, enable their linking to semantically search for ‘panadol’ would give results similar to a search for related articles, provide access to data within articles in ‘acetaminophen’). We have, in prototype, a number of actionable form, and allow integration of data between features based on entity-linking techniques (so, for instance, papers. In particular, the ultimate aim of Semantic Publishing mentions of medical conditions in the sections dealing with is to semantically represent the intellectual discourse of a benefits for military veterans are linked to their document in machine-readable form, including how corresponding MESH entries, from which the user can arguments are modelled within the text. navigate to further medical information; in the past, we Since at least 2010, a number of initiatives have been proposed to promote Semantic Publishing to a broader audience, particularly triplestores (e.g., Open Citation Corpus 4 Nature Linked Data Platform: http://data.nature.com. [110][90] and the Open University Open Linked Data [126]), 5 Elsevier Linked Data Repository: http://data.elsevier.com. workshops (e.g., SePublica [45][46][47][48] and Linked 6 Semantic Web Journal Linked Data: http://semantic-web- Science [67][68][56]), special issues of academic journals journal.com/sejp/page/semanticWebJournal. (e.g., the Semantic Web Journal special issues on New 7 Journal of Universal Computer Science bibliographic database: Models of Semantic Publishing in Science [15] and on Linked http://jucs.org:8181/d2rq/. Data for Science and Education [69]), academic challenges 8 http://www.worldlii.org/. (e.g., the Semantic Publishing Challenge [101]), and research communities (e.g., Force113 [38]). These initiatives seem to 9 http://www.falm.info/. confirm that Semantic Publishing using Web standards 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Access_to_Law_Movement. 11 Cornell Legal Information Institute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/. 12 Australasian Legal Information Institute: http://www.austlii.edu.au/. 1 Even if the first drafts of such specifications were published starting from the end of the 20th century, here we decided to cite 13 only their earliest versions. http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/reports/2014/AustLII_YiR_2014.pdf 2 http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/vowl-2-user- 14 http://www.austlii.edu.au/databases.html. oriented-visualization-ontologies. 15 Graham Greenleaf, personal communication. 3 Force11: https://www.force11.org. 16 Tom Bruce, personal communication. classified agricultural regulations using AGROVOC, and 2016) freely available. All data are non-personal (for privacy linked regulations to related scientific papers classified with reasons) and, in principle, available in several data formats. that ontology). These prototype features come and go as we Each page describes a dataset and presents information about test them for viability, but will very soon be aggregated into a the formats used, its openness, its themes, and the timespan system of